A Widower and His Son Find Kindness and Cruelty on the Road in ‘Census’

The only way to truly assess a painting, according to Cézanne, is to prop it up next to a tree or flower. “If it clashes,” he said, “it is not art.”

This ambition for art — to aspire to nature’s sincerity and unfussy dignity, for beauty to always follow function — suffuses the work of Jesse Ball. In eight novels produced in just over a decade, he has combined Kafka’s paranoia with Whitman’s earnest American grain to found a fictional kingdom of genial doom and melancholia. His fables — “A Cure for Suicide,” “Silence Once Begun” — are wishbone-lean, distilled to their essences. Characters are pursued by shadowy bureaucracies, tragedy is imminent, redemption fleeting; but there is rapture, too, and compassion and the consolations of storytelling. “The book’s principal purpose is to deliver tools to the reader,” Ball has said. “I try to make books that are full of tools that will help with the trauma of life.”

These novels are worry beads of a sort. They don’t distract from the specter of suffering; they insist upon — and help in — its contemplation.

“Census,” Ball’s new work, his most personal and best to date, was inspired by his brother, Abram, who had Down syndrome and endured dozens of surgeries. “His misfortune was complicated, yet his magnificent and beautiful nature never flagged,” Ball writes in the foreword. As a boy, Ball expected that he would grow up to look after his brother, a possibility that brought him anxiety but also quiet contentment. He never had that opportunity — Abram died at 24 in 1998 — but in “Census,” they are reunited, in a way, as father and son.

The novel begins with a father learning he has a fatal disease. He is a widower, whose young son has Down syndrome, and the two decide to travel across the country. Think “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy with Ball’s signature surreal flourishes — the father works for an enigmatic census organization that inexplicably has him mark the people he meets with a small tattoo on the low rung of their ribs.

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Jesse BallCredit
James Foster

Italo Calvino’s influence has always permeated Ball’s work, never more than here. As father and son rove the country, they enact the central observation in “Invisible Cities”: “You take delight not in a city’s seven or 70 wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” The questions propelling the father forward in “Census” are: To what kind of world is he abandoning his son? What prompts us to kindness or cruelty? Who will be his son’s protector?

The challenge, Ball said in an interview with Publishers Weekly, was to write about someone with Down syndrome even though “the use of any of the language associated with disability and handicap immediately forfeits any possibility for a full portrait.” He settled on an ingenious solution: to write a “hollow” book. The son is at the center of the story but only portrayed through his effect on other people. We know him through the range of responses he elicits: hostility, mockery, easy camaraderie, guarded acceptance, joyful recognition. “They came, as I said, out of the house, a man and woman together,” the father notes of one encounter. “People come rather quickly towards you, don’t they? And then they stop at a distance they consider safe — but it is never the same distance.”

But we do directly see the father’s admiration for his son, for his ability to “leap out of his heart into some empathy with the thing observed, whether it is a Ferris wheel or a tortoise.” This point — about the beautiful varieties of perception, of experience — made without sentimentality, burns at the core of the book, and of much of Ball’s work, which rails against the tedium of consensus, the cruelty of conformity.

In one home, the father and son come across a couple whose daughter had Down syndrome. “I can see from the way you are with him that you see — you see what we saw, that they experience the world just as we do, and maybe even, maybe even in a clearer light,” the woman says.

I can think of no higher praise for this novel than to echo what this woman tells the father for traveling with his son, for letting the world experience his gift: “I think you cannot know the good you do.”